


Heuristics

by mr-finch (soubriquet)



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Reading Aloud, Touching, hand holding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 13:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/pseuds/mr-finch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in the universe where Harold ran away from home as a child and was raised by Nathan's family. MIT age.</p><p>"Why stick with it?" I ask, after a moment. "You're about halfway through, haven't you wanted to give up already?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heuristics

**Author's Note:**

> “Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.”  
> ― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

_I hope to feel more than I feel, never less; to know more than I know, and to strive..._

I lower my head. "Why did you stop?"

Adjusting the glasses perched on his nose, my companion looks closer at the page. "I think what he says here is overly indulgent; there is no reason for it to be included if Maria is already taking her leave. Our narrator is chasing his thoughts around in circles."

"Maybe he is." I smile, "Or maybe he's hoping to catch one."

My reward is a shrug of the shoulders, a slight settling in the midst of quick, constant movement from one subject to the next. I am a sounding board, here to be read to but also required to return a noise. It's not that I mind - I don't - I enjoy his company, but my mind doesn't flit around in the same manner, I stick to one subject and think it over without as much talk.

"If he wanted to find his way, he would have found it two chapters ago, Nathan," Harold says, and sets the book down with a sigh.

"Why stick with it?" I ask, after a moment. "You're about halfway through, haven't you wanted to give up already?"

It's partly rhetorical. Harold is quick to find something new to look over, but he is also intensely methodical and prefers to learn each object inside and out before he casts it aside. 

He leans back in his chair, shoulders popping quietly; we both have terrible posture, but I spend far less of my time as tensed up as him. "My mother sent it to me."

For us, that explanation is enough. He lived with my family from the age of eleven, but when we got into MIT he contacted his mother and let her know his address. Or, well, the PO Box he uses for their communication.

Intensely methodical. Prefers to learn as much as he can before casting anything aside.

My roommate, my semi-brother, my longterm friend. On the run from his own family and receiving books he feels obligated to read. To understand her better, maybe.

"What will you tell her?"

"That I believe the narrator is chasing his own thoughts and catching none." He turns in the seat and gives me his smile. 

"She'll think I wrote that."

"No she won't, I'll go into great detail."

I reach over with my foot and push his chair so that it spins around. "Am I your guinea pig for every letter you send your mother?"

Harold takes my foot as he turns my way, pulling at it, like a dog would worry a straw mat. He's not wholly serious about hauling me off my bed, where I've been lying listening for the last hour, but he wants to be. He has this quiet, vivid amusement about him.

"What are you going to send her back?" I ask, giving up my foot; it sits in his grip and waits for him to decide what to do with it.

Harold thinks for a moment, then plants his feet on the floor and starts pulling me slowly towards him. He's off-balance sitting down, though, and the chair has wheels, so he comes more to me than I to him. I try not to laugh.

"Maybe I'll send you," he says, using me to pull himself and the chair right up next to my bed. "Stick a stamp-" he presses his index finger against my forehead, " _here,_  wrap you in paper, and post you. How does that sound?"

"Good," I say, grinning up at him. I've never said no to anything he's dared me to do. I bite my lip. "Shall I deliver the message orally?"

His eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he shoves me in an affectionate way, beguiled and shocked in the manner of someone who can't believe what they've just heard. Mouth crooked, he holds up one finger to chastise me. "Don't you dare talk about my mother that way."

I hold up my hand in return. "Scout's honour. Wouldn't dream of it."

Harold slaps my hand away. "You were never in the scouts."

"Should I have been?" We've spent a heck of a lot of time together over the years. Scout potential came and went; at the time, I'd been learning how to run a ranch and Harold had been knee-deep in books and mechanical parts.

Harold chuckles. "No, I suppose not. You'd end up inciting mutiny."

"They know a good leader when they see one," I say, then take his wrist to stop him when he goes to push himself back to the desk.

He's just as patient as me when we're not bound to a task; for him it's a rarer occurrence, but I know him well enough to see it for when it's there. So as expected, he waits, doesn't try to take his hand away, and gives me his full attention.

"You could post me," I say, and when he huffs the tension diffuses a little and I can say what I mean. I keep his wrist held loosely in my hand, but they've fallen down to sit on my knees together. "Do you want to visit her? We could go together."

He immediately shifts, uncomfortable where I've stirred up silt and rocks beneath his ocean, but he keeps his wrist with me and doesn't pull away. "You know I can't do that, Nathan."

I don't ask why, just stay silent, but the intention is clear.

"Well I-" Harold pushes his glasses up his nose. "You know I leave things. I left her, many, many years ago, and my father."

"I know." I can remember it - this little boy I'd only known for half a semester at school showing up shivering in our hallway, knuckles bruised, the glass in our back window broken. Shivering but dry-eyed, looking at me and my mother as though we were the next problem for him to suffer through, at least until she didn't react the way he expected her to.

She'd explained most of this to me later on, of course, but I can still remember that moment as clearly as if it were today. 

"Why did you start talking to her again?" I say, awkwardly. The words fumble in my mouth and drop like large stones into still water. They could have been said better.

He just looks at me, in the way he sometimes - though not often - does. Like there are many things I have never seen, and he doesn't have a thousand years left to explain them all to me.

I'm about to apologise for asking it, but he interrupts me.

"I don't think it's about making up for anything. Leaving was the right choice at the time, for me." His gaze flits over the poster hanging over my bed - cracked, peeling at the edges - then down to our hands, where he pulls his up and folds his grip into mine, covering the other side of my hand with his other. Fingertips press at my bones, the tendons, extremities. "It's more complicated. Difficult to put into words."

"Are you chasing your thoughts around and losing every one?"

Harold smiles. "Something like that."

I turn his hand over and give it the same treatment, poking into the webbed gaps between his fingers and knucklebone. "Love." I follow one of his veins to the wrist. "That's what I would say if you were anyone else."

He's quiet, but lets me examine his hand. "Maybe you're right." He doesn't sound quite like the Harold I tend to see around me; his voice is a little far away, treading on the edges of his thoughts. "Maybe it is something like that."

He comes back to himself, slowly, and watches my fingertips trace their path. "How do you leave someone you know so well?"

I'm briefly surprised. "I thought you were the expert at that."

"No, there's- understanding a concept, comprehending where each piece is meant to go and how it fits together, but not like this." He looks up at me. "Like a mixture of longing and regret made into a picture of who you want someone to be."

What can you say to that? What words are there? Despite our differences, I am supposed to be the one who can change things for the better. I have always wanted to help Harold become more than he thinks he can be, which is akin to encouraging the clouds to fly higher than they already do.

He grips my hand harder. "I want to meet her, but do I want to meet  _her_  or the mother I've made her out to be? I must have had reason to leave, though I can't remember it."

"You were only eleven," I say, the memory of the wild child's eyes staring at me surfacing. "It's hard to remember our reasoning when our ability to reason changes."

"No, Nathan-" he lets go of my hand, clasps my face instead. I let him. "Don't make excuses for me. I should remember." His eyes are wet, not wild. "I should remember why I left. It's important."

I only want to say the right thing. I want to bring back his memories so that he can make the kind of judgement call he makes every day: with reams and reams of information. I'm speechless instead.

He breaks me out of it. "Give me a yes or a no, here. I have to decide one way or the other; that's all I know how to do."

It's not true, he knows more than I'd ever thought possible. I reach one hand up and curl my fingers just beside my face, around the part of his wrist where his pulse beats. "I'll go wherever you go."

He glances aside and lets out this sob, his breath hitching in his throat, his hands hot on my skin. He doesn't ask if it's true. While Harold definitely has the trophy for leaving, I've made something of a reputation for myself by sticking to every journey he takes.

"You know I will."

"I know."

He pulls back, perching his elbows on his knees and pushing his face into his hands. He's trying to dry his eyes with the flat of his palms.

"Give it time," I say, as if I know something about these sorts of situations. Harold nods, because he already understands that waiting is the right thing to do, and that I am only really putting our pre-made decisions into words. "Send her a book. Send her Ulysses, if she likes a challenge."

Harold almost matches my smile. "She'll hate it."

"She'll love it," I say, getting to my feet and patting a hand on his shoulder as I go by. "See who breaks first, then think about doing more."

Harold's discarded book lies flat on his desk; I pick it up, crooking my finger into the gap where the bookmark is and turning to perch on the edge of the desk. I look up at him and he's watching, that faint amusement back on his face, an expression I don't think I'll ever get tired of seeing directed at me.

"Maria left without looking back," I read out to him, "and I cannot blame her. What I have done is unforgivable, a sin for which there is no recompense or absolution. I seek neither; my faults are my own, my choices made in cold blood, so any and all reparation must come from me."

"I will not be the man she left, not because I must change to regain her, but because change is inherent in me. I am the summation of myself, stood, silently by the door, and that self wrought great anger and upset between us just as surely as she."

"Reunited, we would be perilous. Flawed, incapable people; just as we expected to be. We might apologise, or leave fault unsaid and strive to create something untainted out of the ashes. A new life without any of the history that came before it. I wonder how that might hold, whether the cycle would fall into place and break us apart again, or whether it would be possible to build where we once had warred."

"I hope to feel more than I feel, never less; to know more than I know, and to strive to see the better in people. After all else ends, I am only the sum total of what I love and how I feel."

"It sounds better when you say it," Harold says, from his chair.

"It sounds worse," I say, and smile. "Like I know what I'm talking about."

"No, it sounds lovely." He reaches over, pats my bed. "Come on, read it to me. We can suffer through it together."

In all truth, I don't think my friend has the same hope of the narrator in his predicament, but twice the longing for what could have been. I wonder how close hope is to longing while I return to my bed and shove my pillows into a comfortable place, opening the book to the next page. 

"Chapter ten," I say, "Oscillating."

He listens while I read the chapter, then another, and only when he's breathing softly in his chair do I lie back and leave the book folded on my stomach.

I want to know what to do. I want to help him make a good decision. I feel the importance of this moment as keenly as Harold does, though not necessarily with the same intricacy or emotion. 

If I could spirit him away somewhere far from here, where the days would be full and too challenging to think of before, I would. I know my family - our family - would, too. They'd hate to see him in pain.

But this is something that we can have no major hand in, not I, and not our family. This is Harold's decision alone.


End file.
